Precisely fifty years after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot on the moon, a new group of astronauts reached the International Spaceport Station (ISS) to start their stay there. The launch occurred on Saturday, July 20, 2019 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 12:28 p.m. ET (9:28 p.m. Baikonur time) to carry the astronauts to the ISS.
The Exploration 60 staff includes NASA astronaut Andrew Morgan, Roscosmos astronaut Alexander Skvortsov, as well as European Area Firm astronaut Luca Parmitano. These three will certainly join NASA’s Nick Hague and also Christina Koch and also Roscosmos’ Alexey Ovchinin that are currently aboard the ISS.
Together, the new team will certainly invest greater than six months on the station, carrying out clinical experiments as well as testing area devices. The scientific study will consist of “examinations in fields such as biology, Earth science, human study, physical scientific researches, and modern technology growth,” according to NASA, which will certainly evaluate the ways in which the reduced gravity setting influence outcomes. The experiments will certainly consist of growing moss, printing organic cells, as well as attempting a procedure called bio-mining which extracts steels from ores making use of fungi.
Furthermore, the crew will also be taking part in the arrival and also installment of a second docking port aboard the station. This second dock will certainly be for industrial crew spacecraft, such as those being established by SpaceX and Boeing. The International Docking Adapter-3 (IDA-3), as it’s understood, will be introduced in a few days’ time as part of SpaceX Dragon’s 18th business resupply services mission on July 24. If you’re interested to see the launch as it happens, you can watch a livestream on NASA’s site.
Upon arrival, the docking port will be removed from the Dragon’s cargo hold using the ISS’s robot arm, Canadarm2, and took into area. It will be set up over Pressurized Mating Adapter-3, which is part of the Consistency module. Astronauts Hague and Morgan will certainly perform a spacewalk in August to install the docking port, and also while they’re available they will certainly additionally install a new high-def electronic camera to keep track of the exterior of the terminal. This belongs to an ongoing mission to update the camera systems outside the terminal.